


Fear Death By Water

by roughmagic



Series: A SINCERE EFFORT [6]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood and Gore, Blow Jobs, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Complete, Death, Experimental Style, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, If I Die In A Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) - Tim O'brien, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masochism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sadism, Slurs, Triggers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vietnam War, War, ocelot takes a smoke break and leaves the audiobook on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-01-25 15:54:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18577693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roughmagic/pseuds/roughmagic
Summary: (You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?You remember those are pearls that were your eyes.)Your codename is Eagle, and you don’t want it to immediately take a spot in your heart, but it does.





	1. 1968

**Author's Note:**

> The story nobody asked for starring the man who asked for it. It's Weeping Eagle!

**1968**

 

 

Vietnam is hot, in a different way than they’d threatened. Like the Midwest’s cold, it sinks in through muscle and takes up residence in your bones. It gives you a good excuse to be sweating, even though the rest of the unit gives you a look like they can smell the difference between nervous sweat and jungle sweat. 

They look like every other soldier you’d seen on the newsreels, worn thin and browned by the sun. Cosentino introduces himself, points out Blount, Morris sleeping in the chair, Teddy playing solitaire who waves a bit at you. A black guy barely taller than you measures the differences in your height, shakes your hand and names himself as Goalpost before going back to smoking, looking pleased that he retained the height record. 

The shortest guy in the group steps in to squint up your nose, and gestures on his own face while he stares. “You got a harelip?”

“Not anymore.” The scar’s been there long enough that you don’t self-consciously touch it when someone brings it up. It seems like a vulnerable gesture. 

“Like Doc Holliday,” Cosentino offers, trying to sell you like a used car. 

“Who,” Morris says, his back turned to you and the entire conversation.

“He was a cowboy. His thing was the O.K. Corral. He had a harelip.”

You don’t know what to do with that information any more than Cosentino seems to know, so you shrug. He shrugs back.

You replaced someone in the squad that nobody seems to have liked, and you try to bear the Fucking New Guy cross as nobly as possible until Teddy steps on a landmine. The new replacement stumbles in and trips up routines like one broken finger on a hand, but at least you feel more permanent.

There will be times when you hate them and love them more intensely than anything else in your life, but smarter men than you will write better books about it. Sergeant Barrio turns into Sarge or Just Sarge and mostly Sergeant, you wipe a fine mist of Teddy off your face after his landmine, you catch Blount rubbing mud in self-inflicted wounds on his feet and don’t tell anyone. You get a leech on the inside of your thigh that Cosentino picks off for you.

The nature of the war here is to see strange shit, and you wish it would unsettle you more. It awakens old memories of huge fields, feeling eyes in the corn and seeing how long you could stand to stare back.

Somebody got the top of his head shot off but kept staggering around, a big jut of red bone or spine spearing straight up like a unicorn. Blount rushing the process of a toenail rotting and peeling it off early.

Huge lights in the sky at night, above the low-hanging clouds. Rice paddies overflowing from rain, the body of a bison floating big and bleached in the center.

You prefer the weird things to the sad ones. Everpresent Charlie is just a person same as you upon closer inspection, dirt under his fingernails or a freckle high on her cheek. Repairs made to old shoes.

You shoot an old man without thinking, because you see his silhouette and your gun is already braced against your shoulder, and Morris doesn’t want to call a medvac for him. It’s not a fatal wound if it’s treated, but Sergeant plays Solomon while the two of you argue, snarling at each other. He gives the grandpa a shot of morphine and then a round in the back of the head, and you don’t know if it’s the right call. You don’t know if you hate it because he’s dead or because the guilt has been taken out of your hands. You know that if Morris hadn’t argued then the Sergeant would’ve called a chopper for the old man just to soothe your guilt because he likes to be able to depend on you and would spoil you a little to maintain your favor.

Morris is clearly planning some kind of follow-up to the argument, but you don’t want to wait for him to figure out how he wants to exact revenge. You wait until the night is quiet and then drop quietly into his foxhole, use your weight and your strength and beat him into the fresh red dirt. Blount is in there with him and just rolls into a ball, not engaging.

“Don’t try it,” you hiss into his ear with your lips pressed against the delicate shell of it. “Don’t you fucking try it. Say it. Say you won’t.” Morris won’t say anything, so you stand up, kick him, spit on him, and he just rolls up like a pillbug next to Blount. The two of them curled there looks so sad and stupid that you leave, appetite lost.

Facing a sheer cliff across the river, Cosentino lets out a sonorous belt of, you guess, opera, or something.

Sergeant strips naked on China Beach despite the memo not to do so, as it gave a poor impression of Americans to the people of Da Nang. That ship, he’d said, sitting down in the surf and letting the foam coast over him, has sailed.

Goalpost and Morris are distracting the new guy out in the water while Blount goes through his backpack and picks out anything good.

“If you’re going to stand upwind of me, get in the water first,” Sergeant says. “You smell.”

“I don’t know how to swim.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you in rivers. So go learn.” He gestures at the ocean, the blue jewel set in white sand. His cigarette is burning down, so he flicks the butt into the ocean the next time the surf rushes up. “Prettier place to drown than out in the bush.”

You watch him then, as he shuts you out of his thoughts and continues staring out past the horizon. He has a beautiful profile, but you can’t picture yourself slotting your bodies together. It feels as romantic as imagining your own hand. But you could sit down next to him in the water and wait until he wants to talk, and imagine the conversation is happening a thousand miles away from here. When the light hit them just right, you could probably love anyone in the unit if you let yourself, but there would be nothing more pathetic and loathsome than that.

Blount sidles up to show you a crisp picture of a girl in a cheerleader’s outfit, prize jewel of his heist. She’ll live in his helmet, maybe all the way until he gets sent home with his foot blown off—in a bona fide accident, no less. 

You keep your own love letters in your helmet, anyway, and assume everyone else does the same with shit they don’t want getting ruined. They’re fragile slips of velvet now, softened by rain and heat and sweat, but you can’t bear to throw them away. You picture the paper, all the way from his hands, from under his pen and fingers, deteriorating in the mud, words abandoned in a place beyond the scope of language.

It’s been the end of a long day, you’ve dug your holes, but the light’s still enough to read by. Morris and Jameson are trying to kindle talk about girls and the new guy you refuse to learn the name of seems to think he can climb over you in the totem pole if he manages to humiliate you. “Doc’s holding back. He’s got letters out the ass.”

“I have exactly one letter,” you say, not moving or blinking.

“You only need one to get off.”

“He’s probably married,” Morris grunts. “To his cousin.”

If they all jump you, there’s no way you can keep the letter out of their hands. Different pairs of eyes glitter, testing the moment for how sensitive you are about your secrets. You should’ve buried the letter in a rice paddy or eaten it by now, for how stupidly dangerous it is.

Goalpost leans back to put a heel against your shoulder, like an encouraging nudge. 

“She’s not my girl anymore, so what’s it matter.” You make it sound soft, sulking, a little defensive. You’re generally well-liked, they might drop it at that.

“Read it. Bedtime story.”

“He’s shy, it’s gonna be like, ‘oh, my sweetest dear, I can’t wait to hold your hand again—’”

It might not be a bad idea. It’s been a long day, no one has had any good news, it’s been hot and boring and the Sergeant looks to you as a second in command when his migraines keep him huddled up in the dirt. You can tell the kids a story.

“Well, we met right before basic.” You assume the storytelling tone and the hunting glitter goes out of everyone’s eyes, returning you all to the base state of boys around a campfire. “She’s got long legs and pretty brown hair.”

“What’s her name?”

You watch yourself do something stupid. “Donna.”

“Ooh, _Donna_.” Jameson wiggles his eyebrows and looks like a theater mask in the firelight.

“Shut up, he’s not done.”

“She’s too smart for me. She loves books, poetry, she can just talk for hours and all I gotta do is listen. She’s got—” Your own hands gesture lamely, a bug-bit, dirty mockery of the slender scholar’s hands. “Soft hands.”

Cosentino rolls his eyes.

“But she drops off the map when I’m in basic, and as soon as I’m shipped out she sends me the letter, says, she can’t support the war. Says I should’ve deserted, that she’s moving to Canada and won’t write me from there.” You shrug. “The end.”

There’s some traditional name-calling and bitching because you aren’t the first in the circle to get a Dear John letter. It feels good to let them affirm what you felt, that it wasn’t fair. It feels good to lie to them, too, to build up a thicker wall of believability, fortifying your position.  

Weeks or possibly months later, Jameson steps on an improvised grenade and lives for an hour before gurgling away. 

Morris dies with your hands applying pressure to hot slush under his ribs, and someone gets blamed for not being a good enough medic. Things start to eat themselves from the tail end after that, and you don’t correct Blount when he says he saw poor, sweet new guy take enemy fire while he was turned around helping someone. It’s why the exit wounds are on his front.

Goalpost makes it to the end of his tour and leaves after Christmas. He sends you a Valentine’s Day card as a joke, but you keep it quite seriously.

Cosentino gets buried in a VC rabbit warren and suffocates with the whole unit screaming and digging with their hands to get at him, get him out. That’s the one that really does it for you, and you lose your appetite for the war after that. You hate your heart pounding every time you see one of those circle rice hats, the way you stop looking at the people as people and only look for silhouettes.

You can see so many shades of green, out there. More than you’ve ever seen in your life, even on the farm in spring. You can’t recall the sense-memory of snow. You catch yourself rubbing mud on your exposed skin, not minding the taste of the red earth in your mouth, like your body is trying to reunite with the soil.

Like all things, it has to end, and you do catch yourself thinking for one moment about not going back. Trying to reup, or maybe just walking past the barricades and into parts of the maps where there’s nothing written.

You sweat on the air conditioned flight home to California, you keep sweating as you stand outside the phone booth watching as Goalpost calls your mother and tells her that her son died but they’re still looking for the body and she might not get a letter, but he was a good guy and didn’t rape any women while he was over there, even though he could have and lots of other guys did. He throws that in of his own accord, for flavor and because it’s the truth. He nods and makes some noise about maybe visiting her if she wants, says he’s sorry.

Goalpost’s real name is George. “Your mom sounds nice.”

“She is.” You wipe your face, your neck. The California heat is dry, but you’re not. “She’s got my sister. So’s not like she won’t have any help when she gets older.” It’s maybe the nastiest, cruelest thing you’ve done, and you’re not even in the war anymore. You can picture your mom sitting at the dining table and crying with her face in her hands. You can picture the ceiling fan’s lowest setting, the slight click of the rotors, the lace doily she keeps under a teapot as a centerpiece. Her mother made it. The doily. 

She had always done right by you—she’d saved money same as your dad to fix your face, correcting a mistake. Might even be that she’d start saving again if there was a way to fix you being queer, and for all the trouble you’d caused her in your life, maybe you’d let her. This final insult, to come home fundamentally changed, ugly in new and private ways, is more than you want to inflict on her. Better to die a good son she could be proud of.

George asks what’s next, because he’s George now. He’s got a plumbing job because shit doesn’t bother him anymore, he has a girlfriend who’s a nurse and wants kids, and he’s thinking like a real person, instead of just a human being. You’re an animal removed from its habitat, so you’re just looking to get back to somewhere humid. Cosentino had talked about money growing off trees in Mexico for anybody who could hold a gun.

You shrug and tell him you’re a Midwestern boy, jungles still sound like fun.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is going to be kind of a weird sidetrack, but I wanted to give myself time to ease back into writing before tackling the next part of Sincere Effort-- which is underway! But in the meantime, here's Eagle. :')


	2. 1974

**1974**

 

 

You start eating right, you learn some broken Spanish, you start getting paid for doing things you’re good at. Tracking through rainstorms, breaking fingers and sometimes knees, staying awake facing blank, black jungle. Not asking questions. Not skimming off the top. South America is good for you, and you stay tanned and big and lean and loyal for a good price.

There’s a part of your brain you can shut off, the part that thinks about the way you liked winters in Minnesota, the part that likes to read and think about shit, the part that wants to love and be loved or whatever. All you have to do is keep pruning your ego, stuff _baleadas_ in your mouth and oil your gun after it rains.

You try not to kill anyone not actively trying to kill you, but you couldn’t say who or what you’re fighting for. There’s nothing to spend money on in these countries so you just keep buying good pairs of boots for yourself and giving away old ones.

Mercenaries love to talk as much as soldiers, you find, and they talk at you a lot—it’s nothing personal, but you don’t have shit to say back. Doesn’t stop anyone, and it sure as hell doesn’t stop the rumours that race through the community like wildfire.

“They’re lookin’ for Americans who know the mountains down south, moving a lot of government shit to Costa Rica.”

“Real war, man, none of this turf squabble shit. Real soldiers doing real work, busting Soviets out in the Gulf with no oversight.”

“All kinds of animals out there in the jungle, but aliens? Fuck off.”

“They call him the Big Boss, man’s a fucking legend. The real deal.”

You haven’t cared about the real deal since the 64’ Ford Mustang.

Armed escort work takes you out of Honduras and fate puts you in the same room as Kazuhira Miller, although you’re on the opposite side of the table, and you don’t know who he is yet. He’s the color yellow like his scarf and ripe fruit and very cavalier with his promises, which you know by the sound of his language if not the words. His Spanish is better than yours, and in a smoke break between the two parties—it’s something like oil being haggled over, you don’t know, you don’t have a head for business-- he finds you. Deliberately.

Well, you want to feel like it’s deliberate. There are other places with better views for him to smoke, although he doesn’t. He has a lighter ready when you find your last cigarette, but you can’t bring yourself to keep it in your mouth when he lights it.

“When’s your contract with that guy up?” His English is pleasant and friendly. You’ve got a thicker accent than him, wherever he’s from.

You feel self-conscious about that for a moment, kicked back into being a corn pone harelip farmer’s son facing a pretty college boy. “Negotiable.”

He smiles, and his teeth are very white. “So come work for me.”

Your heart steps on its toes, and you almost burn yourself on your own cigarette.

Technically, you would be working for his boss, and technically, you’re all working for yourselves. Kaz Miller explains it to you as a business for soldiers, able to go where they pleased, work for who they wanted. No nation, no ideology beyond their own freedom and independence. _Militaires Sans Frontiéres_. Your French is worse than your Spanish, but even in your mouth, it sounds good.

After the business is finished, the red sun is setting over the beach, turning everything orange and pink. There’s music coming from the fishing town’s bar, and you feel acutely aware of yourself in your body as you stand next to Miller, who likes to talk and likes you to listen.

“We’ve just expanded and settled into a permanent operating base. Not all amenities of life are available yet, but you don’t strike me as the picky type.” He’s still very free with his smiles, and he bought you both drinks.

“Gotta confess, I dunno what type I am that you’d go out of your way like this.” You shouldn’t have let him buy you the drink. “That’s— I’ve never been head-hunted before, I mean.”

“You remind me of someone.” Kaz leans his weight on the deck’s wooden railing. It’s almost girlish. How does he do that with his body, look so easy and comfortable in it? “And I think you’d be a good fit, and a great asset. _Most_ guys we recruit don’t get a say, so count yourself lucky.”

“Not sure I follow…”

“Don’t think too much about it.” His uniform is well-tailored, but it still stretches across his shoulders in a way that makes you want to feel how taut it is. “What does your gut say?”

Your gut and your mouth say, “Sure. You got me,” right before the rest of you manages to throw back the rest of your drink to make it look casual.

 

 

Kaz presents you to Big Boss, who is actually just Vic Boss, or the Boss, or Snake, it doesn’t matter, he’ll always be _sir_ , a hierarchy you understand.

Snake impresses you the same way a big tiger had impressed you as a child at the zoo—that creature could kill you, probably would if motivated, and evolution didn’t give you the teeth or claws to defend against it. Common sense says to present your underbelly to him like a dog, but he just grates out something like a welcome, slaps you on the shoulder and continues on his way.

Your codename is Eagle, and you don’t want it to immediately take a spot in your heart, but it does.

It feels _good_ to be Eagle of the MSF. Commander Kaz has big dreams and all of them are fueled by money, and you’re good at that. You’re good at solo work, dirty work, boring work, simple work, dangerous work, and you love the feeling of being called on to do it.

Mother Base turns into a home before your eyes and under your hands. You get to know the Boss on the sparring mats, get to take his advice, get to push yourself to meet the standard you think he deserves. Better yet, you get to gripe about it with everyone else. It feels like the midpoint between a community and a family, and if it is a cult, you don’t really think you care. You’re good at it.

It’s deep summer when your bunkmate Iguana twists his ankle coming down off a scaffolding, and you watch him weigh his options. “I’m not gonna die, but…” He doesn’t want to use time off, probably. Then he winks at you. “We’ve got a cute medic. Might as well.” 

You jaw off about how careless he is all the way to the Med platform, until you see the medic and watch him gently rotate Iguana’s foot this way and that, and then you shut up. Real sharply. He’s a man. Iguana makes a joke about his bedside manner and he just laughs it off, kind of softly.

Iguana is almost visibly letting you think that through on the limp back to your quarters, not pressing. You can’t imagine exposing yourself like that, practically through a joke, you can’t imagine how good it must feel. You’re sweating again when you watch him ease back onto his bunk, and your throat feels dry. “So… you like doctors, huh?”

He shrugs, before his eyes meet yours. “I like tall guys.”

You aren’t tall when you take a knee before him, the two of you watching for the first sign of rejection. Anything hostile passing between the two of you would feel like lightning and hurt just as much, but it doesn’t come. Iguana reaches out to touch your hair with one hand while he undoes his pants with the other and that’s good, your hands are anchored on the bunk underneath him and if they unclench they will shake. 

He leans down to put exploratory kisses on your jaw, whispering instructions like he can tell you need them. _Kiss me, kiss me, Eagle,_ and you do. It isn’t like the way boys kiss girls in the movies, it isn’t like kissing Don, because you never kissed Don, a girl kissed you on a dare once and ran back to her friends shrieking and laughing, and this isn’t like anything else, not with the way you feel his face on yours, how foreign he is but how familiar his body is, too. 

Iguana whispers for you to suck him and you forget that you don’t know how, lost in being with him, in being able to see what you’re doing, in doing it at all, heart slamming in your chest. You can feel yourself listening and keeping tabs on Iguana as you work out the process, but your eyes are shut and there’s still guilt in your heart. It’s fucked up that this is finally, finally happening and you can’t even focus on who it is—Iguana’s nice enough, he made the first move and he keeps his parts of the room clean, a good guy, your friend and equal but he isn’t Kaz. You shouldn’t want him to be Kaz, but Iguana lets out a choked noise that sounded like the medic’s codename, and you find you aren’t hurt in the least. It’s a relief, and you try swallowing while you think of Miller’s smile.


	3. 1975

**1975**

 

 

You were supposed to be keeping tabs on a man in the hotel across the street, but it had felt more like an invitation to take things easy. MSF was big enough that it didn’t need you running yourself into the ground, and an easy mission was as good as a vacation anyway. You’d been eating bodega food for a week and working your way slowly through a yellow romance book, ostensibly to improve your Spanish.

It’s been raining all night, the window propped open so the cool spring air rolls in. You’re thinking about turning in from the night when your iDroid goes off at full volume, a single emergency broadcast. By the time you’re on the road, there’s another message, just for you: _Don’t return to Mother Base. Alternate rendezvous point._

It’s not a safehouse but a hospital in Barranquila, and you speed every mile there. The bribes you throw at every border are more generous than they need to be, but you’re a white man with money in a hurry and nobody asks too many questions. They have to know it has something to do with the oil rigs off the coast, the legends of Big Boss.

Kaz is checked in under some formless name, one you forget as soon as you leave the front desk. You seem to find him anyway just by instinct. Knocking on the door is worse than stepping off the plane from the war.

He looks terrible, like no one had the guts to wash him properly and he wants to stew in blood and grime and salt-crusty clothes. Pecked and sliced by shrapnel. A man who would be the moon if Kaz were the sun is leaning against the room’s windowsill with his arms folded, one boot rocking back and forth on the heel, steady as a metronome.

“Commander?” You kneel before him, his legs hanging off the edge like he wants to get up and leave. There’s a little tremble in his body when he exhales. “Kaz?”

“Don’t.” He says it a little too loudly, like his hearing might be blown. Maybe he doesn’t want to show tenderness in front of the stranger, maybe he can’t let himself accept it.

The story comes out in stops and starts, Kaz interrupting the stranger and the stranger sliding in cool facts when Kaz starts spitting, when his voice shakes. Mother Base is gone, betrayed from within. The inspection had just been a cover to get XOF, Cipher, onto Mother Base. C4 on the struts took out the superstructure. Your home, claimed by the ocean at last.  

Snake’s absence speaks for itself—you know in your heart he’s gone in every meaningful way, the way soldiers stop existing when their bodies are covered and lifted away. 

There’s a fever pitch that Kaz reaches when he begins genuinely shouting, tears wet on his face underneath his shades and you just hold onto his elbows and let him shout at you, knowing it isn’t for you but not knowing what else to do. The silver man moves fluidly and puts him down struggling with a shot of something, and you should feel more rage and distrust than you do, holding your Commander slumped in your arms.

He gestures to the hospital bed with a hand—his gloves, you see for the first time, are red.

You arrange Kaz on the bed and resist the impulse to tuck him in or try to call a nurse to put an IV in him, but you don’t want to look away. He’s warm and silent meat now, and you feel a relief that strikes you as unkind. He needs to shout, he needs to feel pain, he needs that, and you should be able to stand it.

“I don’t believe we’ve met.” A red hand extends, behind it a voice with no accent. You note that he smells oppressively of oil and that his clothes are still stained with its residue and it’s hard not picture him fishing Kaz out of the water.

“Eagle.” You shake his hand, distracted.

His name is Ocelot, and he never really explains why he’s there, who he is, what his interest in this is, but you put together that he knows the Boss, that his will aligns with the Boss, and that if Kaz is ever going to be useful again, he needs someone who will say no to him.

And there are a lot of no’s in the early days, which you stay silent through. They’re two leaders already butting heads, and they need someone to follow. Someone to carry their bags and look big behind them during shady deals, they need uncomplaining muscle. You don’t try to keep up with them or the business, you just stand out of the way and shoot who they need dead.

The new Mother Base is a single miserable platform in the middle of an unfamiliar sea, not even the shade seeming to offer any respite from the sun. Sometimes it’s just the three of you out there, the slow accumulation of trusted hands still stuck on the mainland. Seychelles is just yours for a while, bird calls and the creak of old machinery.

Kaz’s grip on you would be choking if you didn’t like it, if you didn’t both need it so much. You wonder if he had the Boss on a short leash as this, and some selfish nights you wonder if he liked it half as much. It feels wrong to speak ill of the dead, and even worse to talk about the Boss like he _is_ dead, but you don’t have the same relation to hope that Kaz does. People die suddenly, easily, and for no reason all the time, and—personally? Whatever happened on the chopper would be a better sense of closure than seeing him rotting in a coma for the rest of your life.

Well, that’s what you think, anyway. Ocelot nods and holds your hand—meaning to steady your glass, really, while he pours another reasonable splash of vodka. You both know you’re drunk and talking too much, out of turn, but you don’t have any secrets from him, just things he hasn’t asked about yet.

That’s something about Ocelot you learn very, very early. He is fundamentally different from Kaz, a deep stillness at his core. Maybe the steady presence of faith, in the Boss, in himself, in the way the world works and his own ability to navigate it. You want to ask him if he’s ever been to Vietnam, but it seems cliché, and you wouldn’t know what to say if he answered. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There he is, the man with a plan! :') (Thanks for reading!)


	4. 1977

**1977**

 

 

You’ve been trying not to drink as much lately, seeing yourself getting slow and less useful the longer you wallow around. Days at Seychelles are empty and boring, punctuated by slaps of blinding action and occasional disaster. Trying to raise money is an absolute nightmare, even when the jobs go right. You learn to work well with Ocelot, who does you the compliment of depending on you like a holster or stirrup. He certainly gives you more of a leash than Kaz, who always wants you at his back while he does something reckless. Being chosen feels good, but having to watch him like that scares you in an old way.

Maybe he picks up on that, maybe he doesn't want you hovering. Kaz goes to Rhodesia alone, refusing even Ocelot, but he comes back unsatisfied. Something hadn't worked the way he wanted to. All you can think is that it must be frustrating going from MSF back to the most basic possible mercenary work, to selling old skills. In his absence you’ve set up an office for him, complete with a bona fide liquor cabinet full of halves and thirds of cheap paint strippers, and at least it makes him laugh. You don’t let it hurt your feelings—it’s become apparent some time ago that Kaz has a more refined taste than you do, but it’s the best you can manage.  

“I don’t think I’m being,” He pauses, makes a face like he might burp flames. “Hyperbolic when I say we could probably use this for helicopter fuel. Christ, you _made_ this?”

“Sure. A still’s not so hard to set up, sir. My dad—”

“Mother Base moonshine, hm?” Kaz smiles, goes to take another sip and puts it right back down. “You should see if it manages to put hair on Ocelot’s chest.”

The Major himself is gone, away on another trip to Cyprus. You have the vague understanding that the Boss’s body is there, either laying in wait or lying in state. Ocelot gave you that secret to see how gently you could hold it, which isn’t hard. Kaz doesn’t think you know things he doesn’t.

It’s something you’ve always liked about him, that he generally underestimates you. It lets you surprise him sometimes, and that’s what you think you’re doing when you cut him off from explaining the sociopolitical factors leading to the situation in Rhodesia. You know, you keep up with things abroad. The necessary tax forms for importing structure-grade steel are beyond you, but you can understand the whys and hows of people killing each other.

“Would’ve figured you had enough of the… news.” Kaz forced himself to finish off his glass and it’s taking more of a toll on him than you’d thought. He’s flushed. “You never struck me as the, you know, big picture type. In Vietnam it was just one foot in front of the other, was my guess. Is my guess. You and the Boss are just like that.”

You should be entirely more drunk to be having this conversation, but with Ocelot gone, you feel responsible for Kaz. For the base as a whole. For keeping steady. “Nice of you to say, sir.”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe that guy.” Kaz groans, sort of laughs, props his chin up with his hand. “That’s why I like you, Eagle. You can _listen_ , and I know you’re listening. You know how to just do things when they need to be done without a half hour of explanations.”

“A good soldier understands the importance of orders.”

Kaz is quiet for a long time. He eventually lifts his shades, pushing them back up and into his hairline. You know better than to stare, but it seems a waste not to. “He said that too. Different context, but, ah…”

Bizarrely, you wish Ocelot were here. He’d know when to pester Miller into going to bed.

Kaz has been talking and only just now senses you might’ve been lost in thought, pokes his finger in your chest. “Did you hear me?”

“Gotta be honest, sir, I did not." 

He grunts. “I know the answer anyway.”

So Kaz kisses you first, almost missing your mouth but licking into it right after, teeth clacking and his whole body following suit into your lap, cheap office chair groaning under the weight of two men.

You have an idea of how he wants this, mostly from movies about men and women and some bad romance novels. He wants it to be a bad decision, to regret it later or something. Iguana was always slow and talkative and let you be shy. Kind, dead Iguana.

He doesn’t really need you to do anything that first time, he hocks up his own spit and takes you at his own pace, he puts your hands where he wants them, he rides you until the chair gives out and sprawls you both over the office floor. Kaz is laughing when you roll him over, shades knocked under the desk and tangled in his own clothes. It's genuine laughter, and you feel some of the long-held muscles around your heart relax a little. Even if it's just a roll in the hay, if it makes him happy...

He stays flat on his back, gesturing you in with his eyes shut and little instructions to _come on, hurry up_ , digs his heels into your calves when you line his cock up against yours and rut together.

The office has a couch, and it’s not far from his actual quarters, but he just wants to stay there on the floor when he’s finished, every bare part of you sweaty or sticky against the tiling. You wonder if he can hear your heart thumping and your thoughts spinning a mile a minute, but after a while he just uses your arm for a pillow and sleeps mouth-open. About the time he starts to drool, you move him to the couch, let yourself get comfortable in the stifling space between him and the cushions, where you can smell his cologne and listen to the small sounds of his body.

Ocelot catches the two of you in the morning with Kaz’s dick only just recently in your mouth, and chides you both while he presses a boot heel into the back of your skull, Kaz bottoming out in your throat.

It should probably unsettle you, but Kaz needs so much that Ocelot is more than welcome, he’s necessary. You can’t or won’t fuck him the way Ocelot will, but Ocelot also can’t convince Kaz that he isn’t doing it out of a kind of scientific curiosity. Some kind of balance is achieved. Kaz staggers back and forth between the two of you, occasionally intersecting all at once, and it leaves you bewildered and accomplished in a primitive part of your heart. It felt right, the logical conclusion to three people trapped in the same situation, mourning the same things, celebrating the same triumphs.

It’s not always even or perfectly functioning, but you can find yourself looking towards the future, instead of merely at the asphalt or seawater directly in front of you. Ocelot brings home a couple of horses at some point. The Diamond Dogs get an official logo.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's better than this? Just guys bein' dudes!


	5. 1979

**1979**  

 

It was never going to last, but you had sort of thought it would last longer. Kaz finishes licking the bottom of your barrel for whatever resembles the Boss and loses interest, withdraws. The progress is steady enough to track with a line graph. You get the feeling he knows that you care more about him than anything else, even Diamond Dogs, and maybe resents you for it. Sometimes pities. 

Avoiding you proves to be good motivation, though. More MSF veterans are combed out of hiding and new recruits are finally approved to begin training, although it’s cramped on Mother Base. Kaz doesn’t depend on you like he did, which you pretend to appreciate. He shuffles your shifts around so you’re less likely to run into him, which is alright since it’s easier to show up to duties a little drunk. Your seniority means nobody but Canary ever gets on you about it.

Your life is starting to feel very long and sort of wasted, out there on the ocean. The same in every direction. You’d like to talk to Kaz and explain your side of things, but you don’t know what your side is. You don’t know how to say what you want, what you hope would change between the two of you.

It’s around the time that you’re thinking of leaving, either by chopper or by a quiet jaunt off the side of a platform, that Ocelot approaches you with his deal. He answers your questions in the same cadence as an experienced car salesman, although he could’ve just told you it was going to happen and you would’ve let it. 

“You don’t want to know a little more before you agree?” He has a fond look, as if charmed by already knowing the answer. He had dragged up another beach chair to join you under the umbrella, your birthday present last year. There had been three chairs originally. Just two now.

“Not really. Either you take out all this shit or you take out too much and put me down.” You swirl your glass and let yourself feel theatric. It’s the last of the moonshine, no one else on base likes it and tearing down your still had felt like a relief. “I’m ambivalent.”

Ocelot gets into your space, sits on your lap, takes your face in his hands and shoves his thumb against your upper lip, his open fascination making your heart beat fast for the first time in weeks. “Well, your country thanks you for your service.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eagle Dating Sim Speedrun, Chapter 1 Any%  
> Best Time with loads: 2 years  
> Player: Kazuhira Miller


	6. 19XX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief suspension/restraint warning, just in case!

**19XX**

 

 

“ _I who have sat by Thebes below the wall,”_ Ocelot says at the end of the last thing Ocelot was saying to you, although you can’t recall what the conversation was about. It feels like a neatly wrapped parcel. A Christmas gift not addressed to anyone, added to the pile of things he’s making from you. For you. “Eagle?”

“And walked among the lowest of the dead.” Normally it’s just words you have to offer back to him. The purpose of a whole line makes you think maybe it’s a bigger padlock. It doesn’t bear dwelling on, not when the whole point of this is to put away the extra things. The leftovers. You lift your head in darkness and feel the muscles sewing it to your cramped shoulders get hot and unhappy about the motion. “What can I do for you, Major?”

There isn’t much, at this point, not the way he’s got you blindfolded and strung up in the ropes. But you want him to know you’re willing. 

_Kinbaku is the Japanese word for rope bondage_ , he’d said, and you can still clearly remember that part. _Kin-ba-koo_ like you haven’t heard him say foreign words with more care and elegance before. _You’ll have to settle for me, though, since Miller’s lost interest._

He’d needled you like that the whole time he laced you up, with that stiff, gray-green rope. It’s clearly repurposed rigging and even smells like the diesel of a boat engine, creaks as it chews at your skin almost as harshly as Ocelot does. He’s always trying to find the spots where you get touchy, where you feel ashamed or upset. The blindfold is to keep you sightless, that pull of the rope attached to some pipe in the low ceiling that’s strong enough to support your weight.

Maybe that was why he posed you like he did, bent over and spread open, arms held close at your sides and hands just tied behind you. An ugly parody of someone ready to take it up the ass. After a long and naked time in a chair, you’d told him it was just nice to be on your feet again, but he didn’t seem interested in anything you had to say before you had drugs helping you say it. 

“Did you want to keep your first love? The boy.” Ocelot for now is a voice outside the blindfold, and even your sorely-tested hearing can hear his pen scratching. You like the thought of that, of him having a little checklist just for scratching parts of you out. “I’m not counting your high school girls.”

“I gave up counting too.” You smile with deeply chapped lips. The idea that there was ever a girl who returned those anguished teen feelings was a joke and you both know it, but you prefer yourself laughing to crying.

“Glad to see your sense of humor is intact.” Ocelot leaves a sensation in his wake, a pressuring relieving in one spot even as it concentrates somewhere else. “No one likes to admit a mistake, but I think ██████’s is completely gone.”

He likes to remind you how much of your brain he holds in his hands, although you’re starting to think it’s more for his benefit than yours. Although he’d framed this to you as a favor he was doing to you, you’re seeing now that this is clearly something important to him. Things he needs to see to satisfy his own curiosity, things he needs to do to you that Kaz wouldn’t tolerate or benefit from.

“We aren’t talking about me, Eagle,” Ocelot resumes, leaving you to wonder how much you said out loud. You hadn’t felt your lips move, but that doesn’t mean anything. “Make a decision.”

“Scrap it.” You shake your head, feel sweat stick your hair to your face. “I’m over not being enough for college boys." 

“You _do_ have a type.”

Ocelot’s not too good to fuck you, although he’s making you really wait for it these days. Must be more of a physical aspect of training than mental or emotional, because there’s nothing you’re better at than not getting laid. He has to know that by now, has to have searched through all your younger years and beyond, how long you’d spent not fucking anyone if you couldn’t fuck men. In another discussion, he’d already told you he wasn’t going to try and excise that, which you were fine with. In his words, he wasn’t a miracle worker.

But he had promised to try to dislodge the shrapnel that your heart and body had grown around, incorporated, let itself be poisoned by. Letting him excavate it had meant giving up everything, reducing yourself to a naked shape in ropes, but it could still work. You just had to trust him.

Sometimes he tells you very casually how he’s failed, or what he’s struggling with, in this reshaping process. It feels strange, like a peek behind your own curtains, although he’s not always talking about you. Sometimes it’s poor old ██████, but there’s another project you think he’s working on concurrent to you. Being Ocelot’s guinea pig is better than being nothing to Kaz.

“Still sore about that?” You must’ve been talking aloud again. Ocelot scrubs a hand through your hair. “We’ll fix it. Do you want to forget that he agreed first?”

You try to blink against the blindfold, just muscles twitching around your eyes. “What’s that?”

“I asked Miller’s permission. You’re a good soldier, so I didn’t want to deprive him of an asset without his consent.”

_You remind me of someone. And I think you’d be a good fit, and a great asset._

“Just some special trainin’ with the good Major, huh?”

“Exactly.”

 

   

 


	7. 196819681968197419751979

**1968**

 

 

Vietnam is hot, in a different way than they’d advertised. Like the Midwest’s cold, it sinks in through muscle and takes up residence in your bones.

 

 

Your whole company look like every other soldier you’d seen on the newsreels, worn thin and browned by the sun. None of them stand out to you, and you don’t stand out to them.

A short guy squints up your nose. “You got a harelip?” 

“Not anymore.”

 

 

 

 

 

There will be times when you hate them and love them more intensely than anything else in your life, but smarter men than you will write better books about it.     Your leader is Big Boss, the only one of them worth dying for, mainly because he doesn’t demand it of you without reason.

 

 

 

He    strips naked on China Beach despite the memo not to do so, as it gave a poor impression of Americans to the people of Da Nang. That ship, he’d said, sitting down in the surf and letting the foam coast over him, has sailed.

 

“If you’re going to stand upwind of me, get in the water first,” Big Boss says. “You smell.”

“I don’t know how to swim.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you in rivers. So go learn.” He gestures at the ocean, the blue jewel set in white sand.

You watch him then, as he shuts you out of his thoughts and continues staring out past the horizon. He has a beautiful profile, but you can’t picture yourself slotting your bodies together. It feels as romantic as imagining your own hand.

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

Weeks or possibly months later, someone steps on a landmine and lives for an hour before gurgling away.

Another man dies with your hands applying pressure to hot slush under his ribs, and someone gets blamed for not being a good enough medic. Things start to eat themselves from the tail end after that. One of them survives and leaves.

Still another  gets buried in a VC rabbit warren and suffocates with the whole unit screaming and digging with their hands to get at him, get him out.    

 

 

You can see so many shades of green, out there. More than you’ve ever seen in your life. You catch yourself rubbing mud on your exposed skin, not minding the taste of the red earth in your mouth, like your body is trying to reunite with the soil.

The flight home puts you in California, and you make some kind of phone call, tying up loose ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can feel it dangling, holding on, like a tooth only attached by the roots. Your senses are rioting but you know Ocelot is still there, sliding between translucent panes of drugs and hypnosis and watching you surface, check in, and self report.

“Is that the best you can do?” Bile is still dribbling out of your mouth, your nose. There’s nothing left to vomit. Sweat and tears pour off your face, your body rebelling and shuddering underneath you. The memories cling to you like oil, filming over you. It feels like being tangled in your own umbilical cord. “You dumb fuckin’ Ruskie. You faggot. Hurry up.”

Ocelot holds your upper lip with one hand and slits through old scar tissue with the knife in his other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**1968**

 

 

Vietnam is hot

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                     on the newsreels, worn thin and browned by the sun.  

 

 

 

 

Your leader is Big Boss, the only one of them worth dying for,                        

  
 without reason.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                        a landmine 

 

 

the whole unit screaming                 

 

 

 

 green, 

 

                                                        trying to reunite with the soil

 

 

                                                                                                                        loose ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A plastic tube drags like crosshatching against the inside of your throat, your stomach, and Ocelot is holding you. Blood is drying all over you, the pain in your face unbelievable and omnipresent. Your entire head has been split open from that point.

“Too much, Eagle?” Ocelot shifts you in his arms, grabbing the tube and dragging it out of you slowly, your whole body spasming, gag reflex pushed out to every other muscle. But he lets you writhe, and is still holding you when you stop, breathing hard and loud through your nose, little hums of pain on every exhale. You sound like they did. The men that died in your arms. You are dying in your own arms.

Your truly split lips feel cold and thick, teeth chattering, every nerve thumping in time with your heart.

“I have a backup plan.” Ocelot adjusts, very calm, very warm behind you. “You’ll have to want it to work.”

He tilts you up easily, beautiful even when you can’t see him, kisses your bloody mouth. It’s explorative and your fists thump against his back when his tongue brushes and lingers on the raw gash in your lip. 

You struggle a little more when he jerks you off, and you come soft into his fist with his mouth still joined with yours and your wound. The struggle is not because you don’t like it but because you can tell he does, and you want his plan to work. These are the only true motivators humans have, you know, fear of pain and desire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**1968**

 

 

First there is some mist. Then, when the plane begins its descent, there are pale gray mountains. The plane slides down, and the mountains darken and take on a sinister cragginess. You see the outlines of crevices, and you consider whether, of all the places opening up below, you might finally walk to _that_ spot and die. Or that spot, or that spot. In the far distance are green patches, the sea is below, a stretch of sand winds along the coast.

 

 

 

Arriving in Vietnam as a foot soldier is much like arriving at boot camp as a new recruit. Things are new

 

You are not sure how to conduct yourself—whether to show fear, to live secretly with it, to show resignation or disgust.                                     You take the inky, mildew smell of Vietnam into your lungs.

 

 

 

 

The first month with   your company    was a peculiar time.       

 

Big Boss   was the platoon leader, a      and it didn’t truly matter what his rank was, not to you, not to any of the other guys.                   he was   calm. He never showed fear. He was a professional soldier, an ideal leader of men in the field. It was that kind of madness,   that made you trust him. A lover of stealth. A pro, a hired hand. It was his manner, and he cultivated it. He walked with a lanky, easy, silent, fearless stride.

                                    He did not yearn for battle. But neither was he concerned about the prospect.

 

            He was not gung ho, not a man in search of a fight. It was a   practical    ethic that Big Boss practiced: Making war is a necessary and natural profession, not a crusade: “Hunting is a part of that art; and hunting might be practiced—not only against wild animals, but also against human beings who are intended by nature to be ruled by others and refuse to obey that intention—because war of this order is naturally just.”                         

 

He lounged with you during the hot days, he led a few patrols and ambushes, he flirted with the girls in your caravan, and, with a concern only for the basics of discipline, he allowed you to enjoy the holiday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            You sit in your helicopter, watching the earth come spinning up at you. You jam your magazine into the rifle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            The day was quiet and hot, and you were thinking about Coke and rest. Then the bushes just erupted. You were carrying the radio for the company commander, and you remember getting separated from him, thinking you had to get up there. But you couldn’t. You lay there. You screamed, buried your head.

            A hand grenade came out of the bushes, skidded across your helmet, a red sardine can with explosives inside. You remember your glimpse of the thing, fizzling there beside you. You remember rolling to your left; remember waiting for the loudest noise of your life. It was just a pop, but you remember thinking that must be how it sounds to a dead man. Nothing hurt much.   Cosentino                     took the force of the grenade. You lay there and watched him trot a few steps, screaming; then he lay on his back and screamed. You couldn’t move. You kept hollering, begging for an end to it. The battalion commander was on the radio, ask where your captain was, wanting to talk to him, wanting you to pop smoke to mark your position, wanting you to call the other platoons. Bullets were coming from the bushes. Cosentino  was gone, you don’t know where or how, and when you put your head up to look for him, you couldn’t see anyone. Everything was noise, and it lasted on and on. It was over, you knew, when   Big Boss   came out of the bushes, carrying a tall, skinny guy named Arnold over his shoulder. He swiveled Arnold into a helicopter, and you went north.

 

 

 

 

 

                        Scraps of your friends were dropped in plastic body bags. Jet fighters were called in. The hamlet was leveled, and napalm was used. You heard screams in the burning black rubble. You heard the enemy’s AK-47 rifles crack out like impotent popguns against the jets. There were Viet Cong in that hamlet. And there were babies and children and people who just didn’t give a damn in there, too.

 But                                          it was hard to be filled with pity.

 

 

 

 

When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville—GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai—the Batangan Peninsula or the Athletic Field, appropriately named for its flat acreage of grass and rice paddy, when you step about these pieces of ground, you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot

 

Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder   if   Big Boss   will carry you to the helicopter. You wonder if your friends will weep.

 

 

 

                        Isolated, a stretch of meadow, the sound going into the air, through the air, right at your head, you writhe like a man suddenly waking in the middle of a heart transplant, the old heart out, the new one poised somewhere unseen in the enemy’s hands. The pain,          explodes in the empty cavity, and the terror is in waiting for the cavity to be filled, for life to start pumping and throbbing again.

            You whimper, low and screeching, and it doesn’t start anywhere. The throat does the pleading for you, taking the heart’s place, the soul gone. Numbness. Dumbness. No thoughts.

            You were not at My Lai when the massacre occurred. You were in the paddies and sleeping in the clay,              But if   you  can squirm in a meadow,  you  can shoot children. Neither are examples of courage.

 

You thought about courage off and on for the rest of your tour in Vietnam. When you compared subsequent leaders to  Big Boss , it was clear that he alone cared   about you.     

 

 

 

                                                                                    Big Boss   helped to mitigate and melt the silliness, showing the grace and poise a man can have under the worst of circumstances, a wrong war. You clung to him.

 

 

 

Standing bareheaded up on a little hill,   Big Boss said you were a good outfit, he was proud of you, he was sad some of the men were dead or crippled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later, you entered the village. There were two dead VC. An old lady wandered about, smiling, and that was all. You took papers off the VC, and the woman went away.

            The men made a perimeter around the village. Since everyone knew you would be mortared, you dug your foxholes deep. And you set up listening posts inside the village itself. The place was full of tunnels and bomb shelters, and the napalm might have missed something.

 

You slept some more.

 

 

 

The next day you blew up tunnels and bomb shelters. A piece of clay came down and hit a man, slicing off his nose, and he drowned to death in his own blood. He had been eating ham and eggs out of a can.

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

“Snipers yesterday, snipers today,” you said again.

Big Boss   laughed. “I tell you one thing,” he said. “You think this is bad, just wait till tonight. My God, tonight’ll be lovely. I’m digging me a foxhole like a basement.”

We lay next to each other until the volley of fire stopped.

 

The day was hot. The days were always hot, even the cool days, and we concentrated on the heat and the fatigue and the simple motions of the march. It went that way for hours. One leg, the next leg. Legs counted for days.

 

 

 

The air is still, warm. Just at dusk, only the brightest stars are out. The Southern Cross is only partly there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**1974**

 

 

You head south after the war, following a letter. Big Boss never forgot you, and he wants you to take your place by his side again. You meet Kazuhira Miller, who’s easy to get along with and doesn’t pay you much mind. You entertain thoughts he might be a little jealous of the easy way Snake and you can talk together, how you move well together, how much you know about each other. Miller’s not a soldier, but he does the paperwork to get MSF off the ground and onto the sea.

It feels _good_ to be Eagle of the MSF. Big Boss has big dreams. You’re good at solo work, dirty work, boring work, simple work, dangerous work, and you love the feeling of being called on to do it. 

Mother Base turns into a home before your eyes and under your hands, under the hands of everyone there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**1975**

 

 

You were supposed to be keeping tabs on a man in the hotel across the street, but it had felt more like an invitation to take things easy. You’d been eating local food for a week and working your way slowly through a yellow romance book in Spanish.

 There’s a single emergency message from home, but by the time you’re on the road, there’s another, just for you. _Don’t return to Mother Base. Alternate rendezvous point._

 

 

 

 

 

Miller looks terrible in the hospital, like no one had the guts to wash him and he wants to stew in blood and grime and salt-crusty clothes. Ocelot is leaning against the room’s windowsill with his arms folded, one boot rocking back and forth on the heel, steady as a metronome.

 

 

 

 

It comes out in stops and starts, Miller’s voice shaking. Mother Base is gone, betrayed from within. The hows and whys pale in comparison to the facts that frame your life now: Mother Base is gone. MSF is gutted. Big Boss is gone,

        and you’re still there.

 

 

 

 

 

The new Mother Base is a single miserable platform in the middle of an unfamiliar sea.

Seychelles is just bird calls and the creak of old machinery.

Miller is a good friend, and an alright leader. Between him and Ocelot, you keep busy, you work from the ground up. You sleep deeply at night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**1977**

 

The Diamond Dogs get an official logo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**1979**

 

 

There are enough people on Mother Base that you don’t have to bend over backwards for Miller, and he’s happy to give you space and agency—you’ve earned it, through hard work and loyalty through some truly awful times.

It’s an uphill struggle, always. The Boss is still an open wound, and sometimes Miller gets soppy about it. In the past he’s gotten sentimental enough about it to kiss you in a moment of high, thoroughly drunken spirits, but you both knew it was a joke, a lapse in judgement.

It might still embarrass him a little, so you find yourself ranging farther and farther afield of Mother Base, just to give him time to cool off. There’s plenty of work in the world for a man of your talents, and it’d be a shame to stay home and let them go to waste.

 

 

 

 

 


	8. 1983

**1983**

 

 

Mother Base is still struggling to expand, but there are a lot of hopeful cranes and scaffolding pinned everywhere. Significantly less bird shit than the last time you’d been home. Your old umbrella and beach chairs are still in circulation, and it’s where Ocelot hosts you for a brief check in.

Coming home to Mother Base is becoming a rare treat: you’re a people person, after all, and you love to travel. You know what would make for a good Diamond Dog, and you know how to work alone. Ocelot points you in the right direction and you do your best to only send good news and good recruits home.

It makes moments like these special, getting to come home, check in with him. Feel him in the same space as you, instead of just a voice over the phone. The Major is an extension of your own body, as natural and fundamentally untouchable as the breeze. He always knows how much scotch you want in your glass, too, since Mother Base can afford real scotch now, and you can develop a palette.

“Miller’s going to be taking some men into Afghanistan. There are Mujahideen rebels to train, apparently.” He says it like a tired husband, a weary cowboy.

You scratch your chin. “Well, it’s an excitin’ part of the world right now.”

“He might appreciate you volunteering, to tell the truth.”

“Major, you’d bust into flames if you told the truth.” Shaking your head, you smile at him over the rim of your glass. “I’ve got business elsewhere. Much regret, unable to attend.”

Ocelot smiles back. Things are holding up well. There’d been a medic you knew a long time ago who told you something about skin grafts working better from the person’s own body, and that’s how you like to think of it. You sleep well, your eyesight is sharp and clear, you enjoy tasting food and talking to people. It’s all easier than it ever had been.

Miller’ll be fine. Maybe something will finally go right for him, and the Diamond Dogs will really get off the ground. And maybe the Boss will come back. Anything’s possible. You feel an investment in it, distantly.

Ocelot reaches out to touch your face, running a fingertip gently along your scar, and you wink, kissing his finger. It’s been healed a long time now.

“Say, I found that book. The one you used.” You set your head at an angle to watch Ocelot closely before you say it, and watch him briefly slide sideways out of the afternoon’s good humor and back into being the Major. “Kinda sad, but I liked it.”

You hadn’t gone looking for it, just run into it after someone had brought it up, trying to relate to you. Putting on your veteran hat gets you a lot of places, and a lot of well meaning small talk. It seemed like a good book, too, although you’re pretty biased.

He looks at you with the kind of honest interest that Miller never had, although that’s a strange thought that comes out of nowhere. “It doesn’t disorient you?”

You shrug. “Fits me just fine. But, I want it to work.”

Ocelot nods, mulling that over. Eventually he sits back in his chair, sighs. You can see in his body language the way you turn into furniture to him, his own thoughts tightly coiled and chambered like rounds.

In quiet moments, you picture it like a landscape—you’ve spent a lot of time in landscapes, in just about every kind, feeling your body trying to fit in and find a space. These days you feel like a winter plain, calm and quiet, good visibility in all directions. There’s a sea of you underneath the flat ice, but you’re a Midwestern boy, and you love a cold winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There it is! The ballad of Weeping Eagle, all wrapped up until we see him again. Which should be pretty soon!
> 
> Thank you for reading, this felt a lot more experimental than most of my other work, so I was really excited to try it out and see what was interesting and effective. See you soon! :)


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